


With Love, Posy

by Deepdarkwaters



Category: Ballet Shoes - Noel Streatfeild
Genre: Ballet, Epistolary, Gen, Misses Clause Challenge, Sisters, World War II
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-20
Updated: 2012-12-20
Packaged: 2017-11-21 19:17:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,204
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/601188
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Deepdarkwaters/pseuds/Deepdarkwaters
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"There was a terrific row when Nana found out I'd only written one letter so she's sent me to write to you all properly, only I don't have anything left to say now and I do think it's silly to have to copy out the same letter twice." Posy Fossil's letters to her sisters from ballet school in Czechoslovakia, 1936-1938.</p>
            </blockquote>





	With Love, Posy

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ElegantPi](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ElegantPi/gifts).



> I wanted to do letter!fic but only show the ones Posy wrote, because one of the things I like so much about her as a character is how unashamedly self-centred she is sometimes. Really hope it works! The vagueness about the oncoming war is Posy's, because I think the girls were all pretty sheltered in the book so that plus her single-mindedness about dancing suggests to me that she'd have been unaware of too many details for much longer than her sisters would, but I apologise if there are any mistakes because they're all mine.
> 
> Posy's letters in _Curtain Up_ inspired the letters format.
> 
> Baba Yaga is a character from Slavic folklore, but the particular version of the story told in the fic is based (anachronistically!) on the one in Joan Aiken's book _The Kingdom Under the Sea_.

MAY 1936

Dear Petrova,

Nana was terribly seasick the moment we left England and didn't stop grumbling until we were back on dry land. She preferred the train but not the views as she thinks France is "very French" (with a sniff, you know, and that shape she makes with her lips when she's cross), and Germany rather "too German". It's very difficult to practise on the train. It was such a long way to travel and I thought my feet might forget what to do if I didn't make them remember, so every time we stopped at a station I jumped onto the platform to do some steps on ground that didn't move beneath me. Somewhere in Austria, I think, a porter had to run and catch me under the arms and pass me up through the door because the train was ready to leave the station before I was and it tried to leave me behind.

I hope you're well and Gum too. Please forward this letter to Pauline and Garnie when you've read it as I don't have time to write two letters.

With love,  
Posy  
x x x x x

* * *

MAY 1936

Dear Pauline and Garnie, and Petrova and Gum,

There was a terrific row when Nana found out I'd only written one letter so she's sent me to write to you all properly, only I don't have anything left to say now and I do think it's silly to have to copy out the same letter twice.

Szolyva is a strange place to be after London. It looks like a picture postcard where we are, all little houses and green hills. Manoff told me the air here will be so much better for me than London, but I don't suppose the London air is all that bad really if I could still breathe well enough to dance so well there. It's terribly funny when he says things like smog and pea soup, you know, that funny accent of his. Nana says I mustn't laugh so I dance it instead. Jeté, pas de bourrée, retiré, entrechat, passé, chassés, arabesque. You recognise it, of course. Please dance it when something lovely happens (Gum and Garnie don't have to) and I will too, and somehow perhaps we'll all know and feel glad. It's very quiet here after all the excitement we had in our last few weeks at Cromwell Road. I'm busy with classes and practice most of the day and Nana has found an English lady called Mrs Haskell to teach me dull lessons in the afternoons and spare moments, but when the two of us are alone in the little flat it's quite glum. We don't have very much money yet but I'll be earning as soon as Manoff says I'm ready, then we shall live like queens in silk and fur. Imagine Nana in silk and fur! I just had to jump up and do my laughing dance right here in my bedroom. I hope you felt something in the air or in your bones, and weeks later when you receive this letter you'll all remember and know what happened, that it was just me laughing all the way here in Czechoslovakia.

Tell Nana I wrote a nice letter this time. She scolds me enough for three now Pauline and Petrova aren't here.

With love,  
Posy  
x x x x x

* * *

AUGUST 1936

Dear Petrova and Gum and Pauline and Garnie,

Petrova, how horrible it sounds to fly in a tin can with wings when you could be flying on stage. Not Mustard-seed's wires, I mean, but real flying, or as close to it as a girl can be without growing feathers. You were always so strong and neat with your grand jetés, much more than Pauline, even though you looked miserable enough to curdle milk with your face. Don't you miss it at all now you've left the Academy? I think I would die. I expect you're as happy as anything though. Nana wants me to tell you to make sure you wash that oil off your hands properly if you're still spending all your time with Mr Simpson's motor cars but I'm sure her own letter will be full of that kind of thing anyway so I shan't. I hope you have a happy birthday and you like the book we're sending. I know you can't read it because it's not in English but there are aeroplane pictures.

Gum, thank you very much for the amethyst geode, and also for writing that it's called an amethyst geode because otherwise I would have called it a purple rock. Nana thanks you as well for sending something nice that doesn't have dead molluscs in it. We've put it on our mantelpiece next to the clock.

Pauline, I almost cried when you wrote about having to lindy hop in your film. What on earth is Mr Reubens thinking? Please tell him you won't do it. I'm going to write to Madame and then she can tell him you won't do it as well. What a awful thing to ask of an actress who acted twice on stage with Donald Houghton by the time she was fifteen. Manoff would never ask me to embarrass myself like that, never. He invited me here because I'm tremendously talented, and they invited you there because you're tremendously talented too. How stupid of them to waste it now.

Garnie, please don't let them do this to Pauline or her career will be over. Please think of me and Nana as well. We're very thankful for the money Pauline sends and you know we could never afford to live here without it. If Pauline does whatever absurd things they want her to do then I'll be ruined as well.

The other side of the paper is just for Pauline and Petrova to read.

I vow to help in any way I can to put Petrova into history books, because her name is Fossil, and it's our very own, and nobody can say it's because of our Grandfathers. (Amen. Should we say amen, just for luck?) I'm going to vow next month on my birthday as well, but I won't write it down because you won't have replied yet. How strange it is that we grew up in the same house and could hear each other call whenever we wanted something, and yet now our letters take weeks and months to cross mountains and oceans. I feel so far away from you both suddenly, as though the miles are stretching out between us by the day. But we're all happy, aren't we, doing what we love, and I suppose that makes everything worth it.

With love,  
Posy  
x x x x x

* * *

DECEMBER 1936

Dear everyone,

Garnie, I'm sorry I was rude in my letter before, but I can't say I'm not ecstatic that the silly dance film went to someone else because it would be a lie, and I won't lie to you, not even to spare your feelings or to make myself look better than I am. And now Pauline is acting for George Cukor! Wasn't that worth waiting for? I've never seen a George Cukor film but I think he must be good because even Nana was quite impressed. Pauline, you've become quite the favoured starlet among the others in the company. They've never seen you act and it's still true. Please will you send me some signed photographs for them to fight over, and do hurry up with this film because they're going to think you're a figment of my imagination. It does sound that way, doesn't it? One sister a Hollywood actress, one sister who flies aeroplanes and mends cars and lives with a one-legged explorer, and one sister training under Manoff. London feels so very far away these days. Sometimes I do wonder whether I dreamed it all and I'm writing these letters to ghosts who were never alive. Have a wonderful birthday all the same, Pauline, even if you are a ghost. I'm sending you sixteen pressed flowers because I couldn't think of anything to buy, and Nana is sending embroidered handkerchiefs because she says even Hollywood actresses have to blow their noses.

Things are very busy here. Soon we leave for Prague, which is such a long long way to travel, fifteen hundred miles or more, I think, with all of us crammed like sardines into the train with our costumes. Manoff has given me such a lovely part in his Christmas ballet, very difficult and important. He is so serious when he talks to me about it. "Posy Fossil," he says in his funny accent with his hands holding my face, "one day all the people in the world will pretend they were in Prague to see you dance Vasalia." Pretend? What on earth does he mean? Then he kisses my forehead and says, "They will pretend because they will want to have been there." Nana wishes he wouldn't talk that way because it's not good for me to believe myself a star, but I don't see why not when I very soon will be.

The ballet is about Vasalia, who is like Cinderella and made to work by her stepsisters who despise her for her beauty so much that they plan to kill her. They blow out all the candles in the house and pretend the rats ate them (the music here is all strings, the cello playing so soft and sinister and then the shrieking violin) and they send Vasalia out into the woods to borrow a candle from the old witch there, Baba Yaga, who eats children. My costume is rather like when you played Mytyl, Petrova, but my cape is green instead of red because the wardrobe mistress said it makes my hair brighter. Vasalia creeps through the wood to the house, through the garden gate which is made of gnawed bones, and when she knocks at the door it's not the witch but the witch's daughter who invites her in and befriends her. But then the wind (the woodwind) starts blowing outside and they know it's Baba Yaga rushing back because she can smell Vasalia in her house, so the daughter casts a spell to turn Vasalia from a girl into a pin (smoke blows around me here and I pirouette quickly behind a screen to pretend the magic) and she hides it in a pincushion until Baba Yaga leaves again, then she turns her back into a girl and I spin back onto stage in the smoke. Then Vasalia and the daughter start talking again and don't hear the wind when Baba Yaga comes back, and she tries to put Vasalia in the oven but the girls outwit her and get away. I have two beautiful solos, one a dream at the beginning when Vasalia is asleep and the other on my way to the house where I dance around the trees and under the branches. The other girls are quite jealous, but I think it's rather selfish of them. After all, if Manoff thought they were better dancers then he would have given one of them my role instead, surely? After my solos, my favourite part is the scene with the dancing skeletons the girls conjure to fight Baba Yaga, who are dressed in black tights all over with a million tiny sequins sewn on to look like bones, so they shine like diamonds under the stage lights. Nana loathes the whole thing, of course. She still thinks ballerinas are supposed to be like those little children in the Academy photographs, all frills and pretty dresses. Perhaps they are, I don't know. Manoff says I'm not to be a ballerina, I'm to be an artiste. I'm still trying to understand the difference, but I think it's that he's taught ballerinas before. He's never taught anyone like me.

Garnie and Gum, please don't read the other side of this page. Merry Christmas from me and Nana.

I vow to help in any way I can to put Petrova into history books, because her name is Fossil, and it's our very own, and nobody can say it's because of our Grandfathers. Amen. (I think it was the amen that saved Pauline from her awful role.)

With love,  
Posy  
x x x x x

* * *

MARCH 1937

Dear Pauline and Garnie and Petrova and Gum,

I'm sorry I haven't written in such a long time when I should have thanked you for my Christmas gifts months ago. We've been so busy after Prague, and Nana has been terribly ill. I'm sure she never mentioned it in her letters because she doesn't like to worry anyone, but she was in bed for weeks and weeks with a fever and I was so scared. I prayed so much and made so many promises and most of them I can keep. I said I would be nicer to her if she got well and I am being nice to her, I'm a perfect angel and I don't ever tease any more. But one night when the doctor and Mrs Haskell were talking in the corner in that horrible adult way that people do when there's a child they don't want there, I closed my eyes and I said please let Nana get well and I won't ever dance again. Then in the morning her fever was gone.

Enclosed in each letter is a programme from Prague and everybody's signed it.

I don't know what to do about my promise. I'm still practising, and Nana is still well, but what will I do if she gets ill again? I wish you were here, Garnie, so much.

With all my love,  
Posy  
x x x x x

* * *

JUNE 1937

Dear everybody,

I don't know which of you told Nana about my letter but she told me I was a silly little goose, which I didn't think was very kind after all I did was wish and pray and hope for her good health. She said if she's meant to die and I'm meant not to dance then we'll know about it soon enough, but she's back to normal now (although rather thin - Nana, thin!) so it looks at though everything is going to be fine.

Pauline, please thank Mr Cukor for sending all those magazines and photographs. Every last one vanished, of course, the moment I showed the others, and I'm sure I won't see them again, but I don't mind. I kept the one of you in the long green dress. How grown-up you look! I hardly recognise you out of a jersey and skirt. I expect the people in Hollywood wouldn't recognise you without silk and earrings.

Gum, please could you send us a photograph of Petrova because I know she won't send it herself if I ask. The other dancers keep photographs of their families tucked into the edges of the mirrors and my mirror looks quite bare with only magazine clippings of Pauline. In return I am enclosing a photograph in each letter, one grand pas de chat during practise and one arabesque. The costume there is the Winter Fairy from Cinderella. Of course I'm not dancing her because I'm still the youngest here and I never get any good roles. I was just exploring through the store rooms one day, hiding from Mrs Haskell's wrath after I didn't do my sums, and I found all the clothes from old shows, from years and years ago before Manoff first founded the company, all things he kept from the Ballet Russes tours before the war that Diaghilev himself gave to him as keepsakes. What clothes! Pauline would be in heaven. Even you, Petrova, wouldn't be able to stop yourself being just the tiniest bit dazzled. There's one entire room that's simply full of old shoes and nothing else, just old pointe shoes heaped in huge toppling stacks and scattered around the floorboards. I'm in that room now. There is a big window at one end with a very poor view, just the roof of the building next to us, but the sun shines like anything through the top half and it illuminates all the shoes like stage lights. Do you remember how the dust in the theatres used to twinkle in the air when the beams of light hit it? And everything smelled like greasepaint and perspiration.

It's different in here. It smells like a library, that musty sort of smell of old books that haven't been opened in a long time. I wonder what stories the shoes could tell if we only had a way of reading them. There must be hundreds. I'll send a pair with each letter if Manoff says I may. Gum and Petrova, I'll send you the pair I found hiding in the corner. They're so very old, like fossils, and the colour is faded almost to grey, but the ribbons are sewn in with a crooked stitch in green thread and it made me laugh, Petrova, and think of you. To think there was a girl all those years ago who cared so little for her shoes that she used green thread. I wonder where she is now? I wonder whether she grew to love dancing or not. She could be anywhere now doing anything at all, if she didn't. She could be an explorer, or a mother, or a piano teacher, or dead. These are my Petrova shoes because they made me think about how different we two are - neat stitches and crooked stitches, as different as Anna Pavlova and Amy Mollison - but in other ways I think we are very much the same. I can feel the shape of the dancer's toes pressed inside the shoes, all the places they rubbed when she danced and made her feet do what she wanted them to do. The fabric around the platform is grubby and frayed to shreds but the box is still there, strong and intact.

Garnie and Pauline, I'm sending you a wonderful pair of shoes I found almost at the top of one of the piles. I saw them and I had to climb on a chair to reach them. They barely look worn at all, beautiful pale pink with perfectly stitched ribbons. I think the girl who owned this pair must have been very proud of them, but I don't mean the bad sort of proud. I wonder whether they were her first pair of pointe shoes and she outgrew them before she could outwear them, like I did with mine, or perhaps there's some other mysterious reason why they're here abandoned with all the ragged broken shoes when they still look so perfect. Either way, she was proud enough to write her initials on the inside of the heel in ink that's turned brown now, although I think it may have been black once. P, like all of us. PD. I wonder what her name was. I wonder what happened to her. I remember how much I envied you, Pauline, when you first started dancing en pointe. I was afraid you would want to wear my mother's shoes, and Garnie and Nana would make me let you. I know how silly that sounds now. You never would have wanted someone else's shoes. You wanted your own, just one beautiful thing amongst all our darned socks and shared jumpers, and you treasured them as though they were made of diamonds.

This letter is longer than I meant for it to be and the sun is disappearing behind that roof now, so I really must go and find Mrs Haskell.

There are so many people here but nobody wants to talk to me very much. I am so many years younger, I am English, I am Manoff's special favourite, I am not like them. Whatever the reason may be, they leave me to myself most of the time and only ever spend time on their dancing. How strange it is that I didn't realise how often I behaved like that towards you all until I found this room full of worn old shoes and stories.

I am happy here. Garnie, please don't think I'm unhappy. But I do wish I could poke my head out of the door right this moment and call for you all to come and see.

With love,  
Posy  
x x x x x

* * *

AUGUST 1937

Dear Petrova,

I'm sorry this is only a postcard but I haven't yet received replies to my last letter so I never know what to write. I'm sending my gift with Nana's.

I vow to help in any way I can to put Petrova into history books, because her name is Fossil, and it's our very own, and nobody can say it's because of our Grandfathers.

Many happy returns.

With masses of love,  
Posy  
x x x x x

* * *

OCTOBER 1937

Dear Gum and Petrova, and Garnie and Pauline.

Madame wrote to me last month about the Vic-Wells Ballet performing Checkmate. Petrova, please please please will you go and tell me all about it? You know I would ask Pauline but it would be such a long way for her to travel just to see a ballet in my stead when you could amble along there yourself in no time at all. Please go. I do so love Pamela May, and what a treat to see a new ballet instead of the same old things all the time. Gum, please ask Petrova to go, just this once, and then she can write me a hundred page letter about carburettors and I promise faithfully to read every word. Madame told me an odd story about Pamela May once, that her real name was Doris May but Ninette de Valois told her in rehearsals that the role she had written couldn't possibly be played by somebody called Doris. Imagine if they said that to us! "No, dear, Pauline Fossil could never be in films, we only want to see Paulina Fovargue or Paula Flibbertigibbet." How awful that would be. I don't suppose a funny mis-matched name like Petrova Fossil makes much difference to somebody who only wants to play about with bits of engine for her whole life and be anonymous, despite our vows. I couldn't bear to have someone change my name. Posy is from my mother and Fossil is from my sisters and I would tell that to the person who wanted to steal either name from me for as long as it took to make them leave the room.

Thank you very much for my birthday gifts last month. And Gum, thank you very much for the photographs. A whole album! Petrova is so tall now, and looks rather like a very pretty boy with her hair tucked up in a hat. So she never could have been a dancer, then, not even if she'd wanted to, not if she towered over her partners en pointe. Pauline's last two films were shown at the cinema in town quite recently but we didn't go because somebody told us there would be people talking over the top of the voices so everybody here could understand. I wouldn't like somebody else's voice in Pauline's mouth. It would be like somebody else's feet attached to my ankles.

This is a rather short letter but things are very busy here getting ready for Christmas. Please come and visit if you can.

With love,  
Posy  
x x x x x

* * *

DECEMBER 1937

Dear Pauline and Garnie and Gum and Petrova,

Merry Christmas to everyone, and especially to Pauline. It must be lovely to have a birthday so near to Christmas, when everybody is already feeling so good-natured and generous. I hope you receive a whole palace full of gifts. Nana and I bought the fur wrap together. It was very expensive but the nicest thing in the shop window.

I do wish you could all visit. What is the use of Petrova learning to fly an aeroplane if you won't use it to come to visit us? It's a year and a half since we were all in the same place. When one has only been alive at all for thirteen years and four months, that's such a terribly long time. I understand that everybody is busy, though. We're busy here as well. I'm writing this on the train to Prague, where we are performing again for the next three weeks, so please excuse the ink blots.

The other side of this page is for Fossil eyes only.

I vow to help in any way I can to put Petrova into history books, because her name is Fossil, and it's our very own, and nobody can say it's because of our Grandfathers. I wish I knew how to help, Petrova. Please think about it and let me and Pauline know if there's anything at all. I vow every birthday and I do honestly mean the words, but it's so difficult to act on them when I don't know how to be helpful.

With lots of love,  
Posy  
x x x x x

* * *

MARCH 1938

Dear Pauline and Petrova and Garnie and Gum,

I woke up this morning after such a strange dream. It vanished from my mind as soon as I tried to remember it and it's only just come back now, so I wanted to write it down. I dreamed something like Andersen's tale of the cursed Red Shoes, only they were my mother's shoes and when I put them on I couldn't dance no matter how hard I tried. I could only run instead. They made me run out of the practise studio and out into the street, where Petrova was watching the sky as though waiting to see something up there but nothing came and she wouldn't look at me, not even when I shook her arm. So I ran down the cobbled streets until I came to the house where our flat is, and I could see Pauline in the window looking up into the sky like Petrova, but she didn't come down when I called or cried or thumped on the door. Then I woke up and for a moment I thought I was in my old bed in Cromwell Road and I couldn't understand why the window was on the wrong wall.

I'm starting to make strange friends here. The other girls tolerate me and admire me, but they don't like me. Instead, I seem to have befriended some of the older dancers without really meaning to. It just happened without my realising it. Some people from Manoff's old company have been coming to the school throughout the last year or so to work as teachers and choreographers and I think they aren't so quick to despise me through jealousy. I think, too, that perhaps they trust Manoff's judgement more than the other students do, because they've seen him work for all these decades and they know how seldom he gets things wrong. There's a man called Mikhail Vasilyev, whom Madame used to know when she danced for Diaghilev. You may remember the photograph she had on the wall of her room with Manoff as Petroushka and another man as the Charlatan - well, Vasilyev is that other man, and a great friend to Manoff who seems rather more cheerful now he's here than he has been for quite some time. They call each other Valentin and Misha when they think nobody is listening so they must be good friends. The idea of anybody else calling Manoff "Valentin" is awful to me and seems disrespectful, but he's been so glum and quiet lately that I wouldn't mind if Vasilyev called him Princess Elizabeth as long as it made him smile. They tell the most wonderful stories of their old lives, and I tell them stories in return, of our adoptions and growing up in London and our time at the Academy, and my Russian sister who is as English as afternoon tea. Vasilyev asked me if I miss London and whether I ever wished to return, which I thought was a difficult question to answer. I told him I missed Petrova and Madame but that I need to be here, I need to train with Manoff the way I need to breathe and eat, because if I don't then I'll die. I thought I'd said something wrong for a moment because of the strange way they looked at each other then over my head, but then we went back to practising so perhaps not.

Petrova, thank you for writing about Vic-Wells and thank you even more for sending me Pamela May's autograph. I shall treasure it forever and ever. I hope you didn't hate it too badly, and if you did then I hope you feel better knowing how happy I was to hear about it.

Pauline, some people here have asked me to send letters to you from them but I shan't unless you would like me to. Nana says they're all silly idiots, which I expect means they admire you for being beautiful and famous and she disapproves somehow.

I must go now as Nana needs to let out some of my dresses at the top. I've had rather a growth spurt of my own, Petrova, ~~but fortunately not a vertical one.~~

With love,  
Posy  
x x x x x

* * *

MAY 1938

Dear Pauline and Garnie and Gum and Petrova,

How different things are suddenly.

I know Nana has sent some telegrams to explain so I shan't bother trying to find the right words. I don't even know whether I'll be able to post this letter, or where, so I shall keep it safe in my attache case for now. Everybody from the school is on one train or another and nobody is saying why, but I'm not deaf or stupid. I can hear when people whisper, when they think I'm asleep under my coat in the corner of the compartment. It seems that Manoff is afraid of something awful happening and thinks it's no longer safe to stay in Czechoslovakia. I'm frightened because how bad must it be for him to leave everything behind?

Later \- I'm afraid I worked myself up into quite a state over everything and Vasilyev found me crying in the train corridor. When I told him why he just wiped my tears away with his thumb and said "No, not everything." I understood then, I think, that perhaps Manoff doesn't belong to a place any more, perhaps he hasn't ever since he had to leave Russia, and nor do his students. We belong with each other instead, him and us, and whether that means a beautiful old school or a cramped and dirty little train clacking through the foreign countryside in the dead of night, we are each other's home and that is so much harder to threaten than a thing you can jab a pin into on a map. We three Fossils are proof of that in our own way, aren't we?

With love,  
Posy  
x x x x x


End file.
